Hamid Gul

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was Director General of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from March 1987 to May 1989, when Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto replaced him. He died of a brain haemorrhage at Murree on 15 August 2015. Obituaries describe him as a strong backer of the Taliban and as known for backing armed groups in Kashmir, Punjab and Afghanistan.

His part in Punjab's history rests on Indian accounts and on second-hand reports of what he said. Pakistan has denied supporting Sikh separatists, and the sources below say so where they report his words at one remove.

Key moments

• March 1987. Nominated head of the ISI under General Zia-ul-Haq.
• 1988. Dawn's Sunday magazine (Shaikh Aziz, 12 July 2015) reported that Gul met Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and proposed backing the Khalistan movement in Indian Punjab to pre-empt a possible Indian threat, and that she told him to drop the card. The article names no source for this.
• 1988 and after. B. Raman, a former Indian intelligence analyst, said in 2004 that Gul justified backing the Khalistani groups as a way to pre-empt a fresh Indian threat. According to Raman, when Bhutto asked him to stop, Gul replied that keeping Punjab destabilised was like the Pakistan Army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayer. In the same Rediff interview Gul himself did not speak about Punjab.
• 1988. Vappala Balachandran, then chief staff officer to A.K. Verma, the head of India's Research and Analysis Wing, wrote in The Tribune in March 2025 that Verma told him Gul "dramatically admitted" at the first of the Track-II meetings in Amman and Geneva that the ISI was behind violent Khalistan activities in India. Balachandran did not attend and was briefed. He adds that Gul released four Sikh soldiers as a goodwill gesture.
• May 1989. Replaced as ISI chief by Benazir Bhutto's government.
• 15 August 2015. Died at the Combined Military Hospital in Murree.

In Indian accounts he is the ISI chief who is said to have treated the Punjab conflict as a cheap way to tie down the Indian Army, a view that rests on the reported "extra division" remark and on the Track-II account above.